Basilisk c-2

by Rob Thurman

  “Well what?” I asked cautiously.

  “What’s the truth? What’s your name? Who are you? What’s going on? That ‘well.’ ”

  She was every bit the Ariel I’d come to know over the past years . . . and more. That should’ve made me happy. Taking into account the situation, I was anything but. “Oh. You’re done. I wasn’t sure,” I said. “I thought you might go on for a couple more hours.”

  “Do you want me to kick you for hours, because that I can do. I take yoga. My stamina is profound. Absolutely goddamn profound, got it?”

  I got it. “My name’s Michael, but I go by Misha, and I was in hiding. That’s kind of obvious.” I shook my chains to demonstrate. “That was why I lied to you.”

  “And?” she asked when I stopped.

  “And that’s all I can tell you.”

  “That’s all? What do you mean that’s all? After you used me? Because that was what it was, wasn’t it? You were using me for. . . .”

  The next words out of her mouth were going to be “genetic research,” and that was the last thing I wanted Raynor to hear and be thinking about. It would muddle things and have him ordering someone to make a run at Stefan to get my case with the delivery system of tranquilizer guns. That was not going to happen. I couldn’t kick her, in turn, to keep her quiet, not with my shackles.

  I went with the next best thing, cutting her off with a brusque, “Fine. Okay. I used you for computer sex. I typed with one hand and jacked off with the other. When I wasn’t screwing Sara from the coffeehouse and was home bored, you were better than porn. All right, another lie. You were almost the next best thing to bad porn. If you’d shut up once in a while, I could’ve moved you up a rank or two. The Internet is full of horny guys. Don’t tell me I’m the first one you’ve come across.” I slid down in the seat. “Jesus, Raynor, you couldn’t do better than kidnap my computer humpday special?”

  I took back everything I’d said and thought about Saul. Channeling his perverted ways had created the perfect excuse to fit the situation.

  I heard the faintest of choking sounds beside me and slanted my gaze toward eyes that, despite the gravity of the situation, were luminous with suppressed laughter. Liar, liar, pants on fire, she mouthed silently. I almost smiled. She was right. There wasn’t a chimera born who didn’t know how to lie.

  Not the kind who lived very long.

  We were headed north. I could tell that easily enough. But where? After an hour I gave in and asked. “Aren’t you the curious thing?” Raynor said. “And I do mean ‘thing.’ We’re going to Montana. I already have contractors in place building a new Institute and an adjoining rehabilitation facility. Busy, busy, busy. I’ve a lot to do and I was never one to let flies light on me.”

  Ariel opened her mouth when he said Institute, her smooth brow under pink bangs creased. I shook my head at her and she remained quiet. “And you think you’ll be able to catch the others the same as you did me?” I said.

  She started to open her mouth again when I gave the same shake of my head. You’d think being kidnapped would have anyone afraid, man or woman. So far, I’d seen her pissed off, highly pissed off, extremely pissed off, and entertained by my lies, but I hadn’t seen fear on her face once. She showed what the old movies called moxie or spunk. She would know. She had watched those old movies with me from across the country, every week.

  “Then why don’t you let Ariel go? She won’t be any use to you at a new Institute.”

  “I told you. She’s my assurance you’ll behave. You’re a very naughty young man, Michael, what with trying to kill me and all. Not to mention we will need a starter kit, so to speak, for the new Basement. You can’t have a Playground if there’s nothing to play with, can you? I think she’ll do nicely.”

  “How much assurance do you think that is?” I asked flatly. “She’s better off dead here than in the Basement.”

  Her eyes widened slightly and this time when I shook my head, she kicked me again. I was lucky to be a chimera or my ribs would’ve been sore for a month. “I like you, Misha. I really do. I always have. You’re special and brilliant and quirky and one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known, but if you try to shut me up one more time, the next kick will be to your face. It’s a pretty face too. I especially like your eyes . . . fox green, but a fox that would never eat a chicken or clean out a henhouse. A vegetarian fox. You have nice teeth too, probably a killer smile. Try to not make me kick it in, all right? If I want to talk to the psycho, I’ll talk to the psycho. And since you won’t tell me anything, the psycho is my only other option.”

  This time it was me opening and shutting my mouth, and not at a shake of the head, but at the lift of a sandaled foot. “Psycho,” she said, realizing I was going to obey the Foot of Doom, “what the hell is going on? You’re government, I can tell. I’ve worked government contracts before. You’re too megalomaniacal to be a cop or a crook and too egotistical to be another country’s spy. So who exactly are you? CIA? FBI? Or my first guess—Homeland Security. That’s it, isn’t it? You have the attitude. Didn’t you asses ever bother to think Homeland sounds a lot like the Fatherland or the Motherland and none of those things worked out too well for Germany or Russia?”

  If Raynor had pulled the car over and pistol-whipped her, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Fortunately, dealing with Jericho and his successor had taught him patience; either that or he was impressed. I knew I was. She was like a force of nature—a whirling pastel-colored verbal tornado cutting down anything in her path. Then there was the Basement, a worse punishment than any pistol-whipping, shooting, or roadside torture.

  “I’m all of those things, little girl.” I saw the reflection of his grin in the rearview mirror. “But I’m also more. You might say I’m a government agency of one. The blackest of ops and every conspiracy nut’s worst nightmare. I’m going to take your boyfriend here, who now happens to be my personal property as everyone else who could lay claim is dead, and I’m going to torture him at great length, brainwash him, turn his mind and soul inside out until he does exactly as I say. And if that doesn’t work, I’m going to put several bullets in his brain.” There was the grin again, colder and sharper with anticipation.

  “Being that he’s actually worth something to me in the monetary sense and you are not worth a dime,” he continued on with Ariel, “you might want to think twice about what I could do to you. I can find an off-ramp, a deserted road, and carve the tongue right out of your smart-ass mouth. That would shut you up. Of course, once I get started, it is difficult to stop. We all have our vices.”

  I’d thought Raynor was smart, and he was, and from his files I knew he did love interrogation. That might have been his problem. He was used to torture, used to victims already put through more than any mind or body should have to suffer. He was used to the broken.

  Ariel was not broken.

  She was an adamantine spirit who’d just been told the best she could hope for was a miserable death here or something worse in someplace called the Basement. You didn’t need to be a genius to figure out it was better to die quickly than pick behind what was beyond those two doors. You didn’t need to be a genius, but she was one.

  A genius who took yoga.

  She raised her hips off the seat, lunged forward, wrapped her long legs around the metal extension of the driver’s headrest, and proceeded to do her best to choke Raynor to death. Having had a tracheotomy, he was down by ten points already. He couldn’t scream through his mouth and he couldn’t scream through his speaking valve either. Her knees—damn sexy knees—covered that completely. I could see her thighs ripple with muscle as she tightened the grip.

  The fact that I was looking at her thighs while the car was careening across the interstate was not my fault. Her skirt was short to begin with. Now it was up around her waist as she did her best to save our lives. The saving-our-lives part should’ve distracted me from her panties, tiny and green with pink bows on each side, but it didn’t . . . and wer
e those rhinestones glittering below her navel and disappearing under her panties? I had the feeling I now knew what “vajazzled” meant.

  That was when the car hit the guardrail and flipped. There wasn’t anything I could do to prepare myself, chained as I was, except for bracing my legs against the floor. My head slammed against the window, then against the seat in front of me. I hung upside down briefly, the cuffs tearing at my wrists. My skin gave way where the metal didn’t. Abruptly we were back upright. Outside I saw tufts of dried grass and I guessed we’d gone completely over the rail and down a mild embankment. Raynor was unconscious and Ariel was now in the front passenger seat. Whether she’d been thrown there or had climbed didn’t matter. She was making the most of the moment.

  “Where’s the key?” she demanded, her skirt fluttering back down into place. For the second time in days I was damning gravity. “Misha, this is an escape, okay? Stop looking at my ass and tell me where this son of a bitch put the key to your chains.”

  I avoided the ass issue—there was no correct comment for that. If I was looking at her ass, then I was too perverted to care about saving my life, and if I wasn’t looking, then she’d want to know why I wasn’t looking. I went with the simple truth. “I don’t know. I was unconscious when he put them on me.” More like three-fourths dead, but we didn’t need to go into that. “Check his suit pocket, then his pants pocket.”

  “Oh, fun for me. Having to stick my hand next to a psycho’s wienerschnitzel.” She searched his suit jacket pockets first and found nothing. “Wonderful,” she snapped before gamely going into his pants pocket. “Whoops, I was wrong. Not a wienerschnitzel. Closer to a cocktail weenie. Doesn’t it figure. Massive ego, teeny weenie. Ah ha!” Triumphantly, she held up the keys, reached across him to undo the childproof locks to the doors, and had me unchained in less than three seconds. “Don’t look so worried, Misha.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’m not an S&M queen. I worked as a magician’s assistant one summer. I can also hold my breath for three minutes under water. You wouldn’t believe how popular that made me when I turned eighteen.”

  I could imagine all right and now wasn’t the time for it, but for once my body didn’t obey me. I found out it was not impossible to run with an erection, but it was somewhat uncomfortable. We headed away from the interstate. No one was going to pick up two people hitching for a ride at four in the morning and I didn’t want to run into any police. That was a complication to avoid. I hated leaving Raynor alive, but if I had been the killer I refused to be, I couldn’t kill him in front of Ariel anyway. That would be a much bigger complication than the police.

  That meant we ran. If only two hours had passed since Raynor had kidnapped me from the motel in Springerville, we were still in Arizona. All we had to do was find a phone and have Stefan and Saul come get us. However, in the ambient light of a sickle moon, it looked as if we were in a popular Arizona attraction, the Petrified Forest. There weren’t a lot of phones there. Petrified or otherwise.

  Chapter 10

  Ariel leaped over fallen stone tree trunks with as much grace and style as if it were an event in the Olympics and she were being judged. All tens. She also didn’t stumble a single time. Considering we were away from the highway lights and going by the limited light of the moon, that was impressive. I didn’t stumble either, but chimeras had excellent night vision and mine had only become better as I matured, the same as everything else.

  “You have great night vision,” I said as we ran, neither of us winded so far.

  “You have no idea. My brother, not the hacker, but my other brother, is a pilot. His vision is twenty-ten. My whole family is freakishly talented, apart from my sister. She’s four and tells everyone she’s an alien or a visitor from an alternate dimension, depending on her mood. She collects toy horses, then covers them up with little blankets for bedtime, except she covers them all up—including their heads. Her room looks like a fluffy pink horse morgue. She also wants to design shoes made out of human hair. She doesn’t say where she’s going to get the human hair, though, so when I go home to visit, I tend to lock the door. By the way, I was going to ask if that was a ferret in your pocket or were you just happy to see me, but I already saw the hard-on, so I’ll just go with nice ferret.”

  I grinned. With Ariel, there was no point in being embarrassed or you’d spend every minute of the day bright red. “Thanks. His name’s Godzilla.”

  “The ferret or your penis?”

  “I’ll let you guess.” I stopped to get my bearings. Looking up at the position of the stars, I started running again, bearing to the right.

  “With my night vision and the ability to visually measure to within approximately one centimeter, do you really want me to?” She was laughing again. Not many people laughed after being kidnapped, being involved in a car wreck, and having to use yoga skills to choke out an evil son of a bitch.

  Godzilla poked his head farther out of my jacket pocket and chirped curiously. “I think I’d rather you didn’t. Godzilla, meet Ariel. Ariel, meet Godzilla. He bites pretty much every chance he gets. I think the Visitor Center is this way. We can call for help.”

  I didn’t say call my brother. I’d been careful not to give out any details about Stefan or to mention that he even existed when e-mailing or talking to Ariel. I’d been taking a risk with her from the beginning by investigating the genetics issue, and growing to know each other hadn’t made the risk any less. I hadn’t been willing to add Stefan into that mix. When she asked about family, I told her my parents were dead and my sister had been in the Peace Corps but died in a plane crash in Africa. That tended to limit questions and made me as sympathetic an orphan as a grown man could possibly be.

  “It is? How do you know? Have you been here before? You know, when you weren’t running from a crazed psychopath with deep, dark, and mysterious designs on you that you haven’t bothered to explain yet?”

  Since I’d met Ariel online, I’d noticed she never used one word when five hundred would do. Just as she never wore one color when there were at least seven right at hand. “Yes, I’ve been here before.” I picked the question that could get me in the least amount of trouble. And saying, no, but I had memorized the maps of every state we’d passed through so far in case escape routes were needed wasn’t something I was willing to offer. It wasn’t as if I could pass it off as an interesting hobby.

  “So, if we find the Visitor Center”—she sailed over another petrified tree—“and we break in to use their phone, who are we going to call? That guy’s government, the kind of government that the government itself barely knows exists. He can eat police for breakfast and make prisoners disappear forever. The police can’t help us with whatever bizarre thing you’re involved in. Oh, hey, my little sister would kill me if I didn’t ask: Are you an alien? This is just like all the movies where peaceful aliens come to Earth and the evil government tries to dissect them. Although I highly doubt any alien would come here. I believe in aliens. Trillions upon trillions of galaxies; we can’t be the only intelligent life out there. But with all our fighting, wars, disease, poverty, and reality TV, we’re like the meth–central, white-trash trailer park of our corner of the Milky Way. No alien would stop here to gas up. And who could blame them?”

  There’d been a question in there somewhere. Now, what had it been again? Right. Whom were we going to call. “I have a friend who lives close to here. I’ll call him.”

  It turned out I didn’t have to call Stefan. He pulled into the Visitor Center at the same time we made it in. He didn’t look pleased. He didn’t look pleased in the way Rabid Zombie Werewolves from Mutant Hell—it was a real movie; I’d seen it—weren’t pleased. He opened the door of the SUV and stepped out. There was the subtle motion of him putting his gun in the back of his jeans that no ordinary person would notice, twenty-ten vision or not. “What the fuck happened?” he demanded. He could’ve said more, considerably more. Out of nowhere it was my Internet friend from New York. I was in the middle of a p
ark instead of asleep in my motel bed. I’d left everything behind, including my phone . . . everything except Godzilla. He had a bubbling volcano full of questions and he couldn’t ask any of them in front of Ariel.

  I had some too, the main one being how he had found me.

  “This is your friend? Is he psychic or what? How’d he know where we’d be? And why’s he so angry? What a temper. I don’t know that I’d be friends with someone with that kind of temper.” That was a good one with the way she’d done her best to break my ribs in Raynor’s car. “And could someone kick in the door to the Visitor Center? I have to use the ladies’ room, and I don’t want to go around back and get my ass stung by a scorpion.”

  Saul stepped out of the other side of the vehicle. I pointed at him. “He’ll kick it down for you. That’s Bubba, my other friend.”

  It was almost worth Raynor’s being left alive to kidnap and plot to see the contortions Saul’s face went through when he was labeled with the fake “Bubba.”

  “Yeah, sure, chiquita,” he said dubiously. “I’ll kick it down for you.” It took him a few tries, but once they were inside and I heard the bathroom door slam, both Stefan and I went at it.

  “Raynor’s alive. I was out putting money in the vending machine,” I started to explain—I supposed we’d have to leave money to pay for the Visitor Center door too; being a good citizen was frequently frustrating—“and he shot me in the head with a rubber bullet. I woke up, chained, in a car going north. He’s building a new Institute in Montana and was taking me there. One of his goons stumbled across Ariel in Cascade. She was worried about me and had tracked my IPS, although I bounced it around the globe a few hundred times. She’s apparently as smart or smarter than I am.” Which everyone lately appeared to be. “He thought she’d be insurance on my good behavior. She figured out he’s government of some kind. She thought my name was Bernie, but she heard him call me Michael. We escaped when she choked him out with her legs—she takes yoga—while he was driving. The car flipped and we escaped. She doesn’t know I have a brother. I said I’d call a friend from the Visitor Center for help. That’s it.” My short time in person with Ariel had taught me how to spit out a lot of information in very little time. It was useful.